Dan Soschin

Washington Post’s Take on Content Farms

Not much new to add to my analysis, but between the post, eWeek and the New York Times, I’d say awareness has increased in the last two weeks dramatically.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/29/AR2011012903731.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/28/AR2011012803849_3.html?sid=ST2011012804185
Time is Ticking for Content Farms

Google publicly announces another step towards ridding the ‘net of content farms:

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=145070#
Time for a Website Redesign?

Andrew Follett makes a good point in his recent article regarding website redesign:

I’m sick of looking at the same website every day!

Using the same website day after day can get tiresome, but keep in mind that many, if not most, of your visitors don’t see your site every day. So although it may seem to you that it’s time for a change, your visitors are likely just starting to get used to your website.

You can read the full article here:

http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2011/4348/how-to-plan-a-successful-website-redesign?adref=nlt020111
Social Media – Embrace & Extend – 4 Tips
Lately, I’ve encountered numerous articles discussing how companies have been restricting access to social media – either by blocking it altogether during the day or placing a dictatorial moratorium on tweeting as an employee.

I suggest for my clients to take the EXACT OPPOSITE approach.

Okay, okay, don’t get all worked up. I still advocate a highly evolved and well thought out social media policy. But keep it simple (or people won’t read it). So here’s my high-level suggestion:
1. High-Level Policy – it should be no more than a couple of pages and explain who should do what and why. It basically should outline authority and that posts should be void of editorial and full of fact, integrity and transparency. The shorter your policy the more likely it will be followed. (duh!) It should also denote who should respond to various types of posts, and provide a triage and escalation procedure.
2. Social Media Usage Guide – this is seldom done but highly recommended. Outline each social media platform that you want folks to use (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.) and provide examples and use cases of how to properly use it and explain common missteps to avoid.
3. Monitor – invest in some good monitoring services so you can see what people are saying and what your employees are posting. Then, use missteps as teaching opportunities and successes as leadership examples (gold stars).
4. Educate – create a social media orientation module as part of our new hire orientation and make sure existing employees go through the training as well. It should include a quiz with “what if” scenarios.
Your employees should be your brand ambassadors – it’s free, accurate and genuine cheerleading that can reach so many more people. Most everybody is already on Facebook, so just having a few extra employees trumpet something can go a long way to reach several thousand more people. User generated content is more powerful than advertising, so why wouldn’t you tap this virtually free resource?

Just be their to assist, support, extend, embrace and coach your staff and you’ll be able to leverage an army of social referrals.

Here’s a great article on this subject by Derek Gordon: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=144415
Companies don’t know how to use social media
Erik Sass at the blog, The Social Graf wrote a very interesting article recently on the ROI companies are achieving through investments in social media. For instance, he references a survey be eMarketer that found that only 15.4% of respondents believed Facebook was delivering “significant ROI”. (http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=144511&nid=123539)

I would content that those who are not obtaining ROI from their investments in sites such as Facebook and Twitter are not using it properly. In fact, most businesses frankly don’t know “squat” about social media. They don’t know how to use it for:
- customer engagement
- customer service
- listening/feedback/surveys
- market research
- lead generation
- advertising
One particular client of mine had a Facebook page and thought they were done with social media. They had a Twitter handle and once or twice a week would post a PR or a event announcement. Seriously. I helped them understand how to achieve value from social media by putting together an easy to follow action plan that enabled them to leverage, monitor, measure and succeed from their investment.

In another instance, I had someone try advertising on Facebook (the largest site in the world when it comes to display advertising inventory. This client frankly didn’t understand Facebook and treated with limited respect. The result was a campaign that failed to deliver positive ROI. When I took over the campaign and helped rebuild it, we took the campaign from only generating $0.20 per dollar invested, to generating $1.85 per dollar invested in only two weeks. (That’s an increase of 9x if I don’t want to be modest.)

The bottom line is most businesses aren’t good at social media. So I encourage them to make a small investment in bringing in temporary help to get them up to speed and on the righteous path to success.
Search Engines & Content Providers

As more and more search engines enter the content creation world, will the boundaries of editorial integrity be crossed?

If Google starts acquiring blogs to sell ads on those blogs, wouldn’t they be more inclined to ensure those blogs spoke positively of Google and negatively of its competitors? Okay, perhaps not entirely conspicuously – but if you network of content creation is large enough, maybe it doesn’t matter. Google just wants to make money, and that requires articles people read (a.k.a ad inventory). Sometimes negative articles make you more transparent and create plenty of ad inventory.

Further analysis here: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=144500&nid=123530#
5 Lead Generation Tips

MarketingProfs gives us this article on lead generation tips for B2B folks (though I have found that leadgen tips often span both B2B and B2C).

http://www.mpdailyfix.com/5-things-you-need-to-know-to-boost-your-lead-generation/

Here’s the deal. I’m running a multi-million dollar search campaign for a client and we’re obviously very focused on campaign copy, audience targeting and creative. However, in campaigns of this size, even the slightest percentage increase can yield huge ROI gains. So, focusing on your landing page and conversion funnel is extremely important. Gains in your funnel can dramatically improve your ROI. I recently change the form and registration step on a landing page and saw a gain in click-to-conversion of 400% for the campaign. Caution: results aren’t typical. We were looking for a 10-25% increase. Who knew. But now we’re not stopping there. We’re doing further split testing to see what the right combination of fields and steps are.

Then, we’re moving down the funnel and looking at our marketing automation. We’re analyzing what messages are sent to new leads and when, and at what interval. We’re working with our sales team to understand what else we can do to deliver leads. So, as you can see, you cannot focus on just one area. There are gains to be had everywhere.
11 Tips for Driving Traffic to your Blog
Problogger recently posted a great “200-level” article on their site with regards to driving traffic. Obviously 100-level stuff consists of the basics we all know (like posting quality content with good, catchy titles). This 200-level article discuss some lesser known tips, which I highly recommend.

My bonus tip is to repost content you find interesting, and add your own commentary. Essentially, that’s what I’m doing right now. By doing this you achieve a couple things:
- You increase the amount of relevant content on your blog with ease
- You expose your readers to additional resources and they’ll appreciate that by referencing your site more frequently
- You expose your blog to the owner of the blog you are referencing by a pingback. Hopefully they’ll return the favor!
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2011/02/05/10-little-known-ways-to-get-traffic-to-your-blog/
How Content Farms are Killing the Internet

AOL just convinced itself to pay $315 for the HuffPost, which produces limited original content, outside of the ranting deranged posts of its readers who comment on the articles HuffPost assembles and reposts from other sites and sources.

Content farms are a true travesty on the internet, hurting high quality content providers and the end user.

The New York Times just penned a great article on this: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/business/media/11search.html?hpw.

The bottom line though is it will be tough for Google to crack down on these abusers who provide low value content. They do a great job at capturing traffic, which ultimately brings in traffic that in turn clicks on Google ads… So Google is making a ton of money off of these farms and therefore, it it lowered the rankings of the sites, it could lose money. The hope is that this will not happen because the better sites will get clicked, and generate revenue for Google; and more people will have a better experience, leading to more clicks. Recent data suggests that Google is losing this battle versus Bing. Bing is getting more people to click on a result than Google. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google updates its algorithm to slowly lower the rankings of sites that produce mostly crap content.
LinkedIn – Marketing Tips

Great article from the TopRank marketing blog on using linked in for Marketing purposes… http://www.toprankblog.com/2011/01/linkedin-tips/

Here’s my list:

1. Make sure your profile “sells you” and promotes what you do through your links, recommendations and content.

2. Make connections with only those whom you do business with. If you don’t recognize names of people on your connections list, it’s time to remove them. You don’t have to connect with everyone in your group. If you are in the same group, then you are already connected.

3. When reaching out to do new business with a company, see who you might already be connected to at that company first.

4. Looking for a job? Once you find a listing, search your connections again to see if you might be connected to someone who has an “in” at that company

5. List your profile on your resume and include it in your bio